by Ioan Grillo
We get to a Templar safe house in the hills. It’s a one-story home of white wood, better than many shacks here. The vigilantes storm in taking combat positions but the enemy has fled. They curse, wanting someone to fight.
There is a hot pot of stew on the stove showing the gangsters have only just gone. Their spies must have seen us coming so they ran. The vigilantes rip up the floorboards and walls searching for anything they left: bullets, drugs, money. They settle for ransacking an electric fan.
My colleague Ross McDonnell went with another group of vigilantes into a house that Nazario himself had just been in. Some of his books were on the shelves, including The Art of War, along with a DVD box set of Hitler documentaries. There was also a teenage girl, who had apparently been Nazario’s latest love interest. The vigilantes spared her, but made her cook for them.
One of the vigilantes that I trek with is a corn farmer called Elias. He took up arms as the Templars had tortured him for not paying his extortion quota. The thugs beat Elias on the lower back with a stick giving him injuries that he still suffers from when he stands up or lies in bed at night.
“They showed no mercy when they beat me.” He grabs my arm hard, shaking with anger as he describes it. “The pain drives me. It drives me to look for justice.”
I wonder if what he wants is more revenge. Or is there a real difference between these concepts?
CHAPTER 47
When we get to the final scene in the life of Nazario, there are two versions. They are both dramatic. But I think the second sounds most realistic.
Version one is the government’s. In this reel, Nazario meets his death in the early morning of March 9 after he celebrates his forty-fourth birthday. The marines say they found him high in the hills near a town called Tumbiscatío; when they ordered him to surrender he fired and they shot him dead.
They offered few other details. One official told a Mexican newspaper Nazario had been traveling alone on a mule. Another said he had just visited a girlfriend. To prove he was gone they released pictures of his fingerprints and the video, in which you see his corpse with a blackened beaten face.
There are good reasons to doubt the government’s account. Even though he had lost much support, it is odd that he would be alone. It would be an immense stroke of luck for security forces to simply run into him. And the government offered no explanation for the facial bruising.
I hear the alternate version from several sources inside the self-defense movement, including from Adalberto Fructuoso Comparán, head of the vigilantes in Aguililla. They say vigilantes had plotted with Nazario’s bodyguards to take him down. The bodyguards realized their boss was finished and were tired of his increasingly loco ways. While Nazario celebrated his birthday, they turned on him and held him until vigilantes arrived. The vigilantes and bodyguards then beat Nazario into the next world. They handed his corpse to the marines; it made the government look good and saved the vigilantes having to deal with murder charges.
A message offering a similar account was posted on a vigilante Facebook page. But the Mexican government stuck to their version. Mystery surrounds Nazario in death as it did in life. Some conspiracy theorists even say he never died at all. When the government has got it wrong (or lied) once, it’s easy to believe it could do it again.
I am personally convinced the narco saint died that day. This time, they had a body. They also had a wake, a week later in the city of Morelia, and I sped down there to arrive outside the funeral home.
Nazario’s wake is in a luxury locale with gleaming white pillars and spacious rooms. The screen announces his name simply as “El Más Loco”—The Maddest One—and guests arrive all in white, the color of his beloved Kaliman. A band plays drug ballads to a gathering of mostly women and children. Many of his gangster friends stay away, as soldiers are close by watching.
A man in a suit with a scar across his face tells us to leave or there will be trouble. We loiter outside, and he tells us to leave again in an angrier voice. We leave.
Later that night, a convoy of vehicles takes Nazario’s body into the hills of his birth. No journalists have yet discovered if he was buried or cremated or where his remains might lie. His family could be hiding his final resting place for fear it would be defaced.
In the weeks after Nazario’s death, his Templar empire collapsed like a deflating bouncy castle. The remaining towns fell and Templar money collectors stopped coming, liberating businesses from extortion. Almost all the cartel bosses were killed or arrested.
But one Templar evaded everyone: the joker in the deck, La Tuta. Despite the fact that he released his propaganda videos, and even gave interviews to two TV stations, the security forces couldn’t find him. I follow troops on an operation to hunt him. With intelligence that he is wandering on a mule, they get every force involved, state police, soldiers, marines, federal detectives, and thousands of vigilantes. They make a net around the mountains and close in over days. But they find nothing.
To add insult to injury, a stream of new videos appeared showing La Tuta with various mayors and even the governor’s son. In response, federal police handcuffed a long line of politicians. The Michoacán governor resigned after his son was carted off to jail. The rotten Michoacán apparatus crumbled with the Templars.
I wondered if La Tuta had done what other Mexican narcos could never manage and fled to the Caribbean where he was laughing from a beach. But finally, soldiers busted him in a house in Morelia. Before then, he had been hiding in the mountains in a dank bat-infested cave, where he used to keep prisoners.
Peña Nieto now faced the problem of what to do with the thousands of ragged vigilantes, teeming with ex-Templars. He decided to give them badges. Under his viceroy Castillo, a new State Rural Force was created of vigilantes in uniforms.
Some self-defense leaders resisted. Doctor Mireles said there were too many gangsters and spoke against the government in increasingly revolutionary language. The government arrested him on gun charges and shipped him to federal prison.
Other vigilante bosses joined the new police. The Rural Force ended the images of gunmen in jeans and baseball caps embarrassing Peña Nieto. But it was a time bomb waiting to go off. Many former Templars and Jalisco cartel affiliates now had badges. It is at this time I find the “Dirty Dozen,” some in Rural uniforms, showing off their G3s and grenade launchers. A documentary filmed at this time, Cartel Land, even showed a man in a Rural uniform describing how he cooked meth. It also went inside a base where Rurales were questioning people and screams of torture could be heard.1
Residents of Hot Land towns filed dozens of complaints that the Rural Forces were shaking people down and trafficking drugs. At the close of 2014, rival Rural Force groups had a shoot-out that left eleven dead, including Hipólito Mora’s son. In 2015, the envoy Castillo was replaced by a general and the government said it would review disbanding the force.
Michoacán seemed to have traded one set of gangsters for another.
The collapse of the Templars was also a big boost to their rivals in the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The Jalisco mob took over Templar meth routes, adding them to its empire that now stretched from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. They copied the Templar guerrilla tactics, and even turned them up a notch.
When the Peña Nieto government tried to take down Jalisco leaders in 2015, its gunmen assassinated dozens of police. In a single ambush, they shot dead fifteen state and federal troopers. In another attack, Jalisco thugs fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an army helicopter, making it crash and killing eight soldiers and a police officer. The image of Mujahedeen bringing down Soviet choppers with stinger rockets sprung to mind. That same day, a May first public holiday, the Jalisco mob blocked roads with burning trucks at thirty-nine points. Police also raided a farmhouse to discover that the cartel even had its own gun factory, assembling untraceable AR-15 rifles from component parts.
Peña Nieto may have an even bigger problem than the Templars.
; To add to the president’s woes, the July 2015 escape of Chapo Guzmán from prison shook public confidence that he could control drug traffickers any better than Calderon or Fox had. Guzmán fled what was supposed to be the nation’s top security prison—its Supermax—through a mile-long tunnel with electric lights and air vents.
The brazen jailbreak raised hard questions about corruption in the prison or even higher up in the administration. It also infuriated U.S. DEA agents, who had helped Mexican marines capture Guzmán in 2014 in the resort of Mazatlan. That arrest of Guzmán, which came two weeks before the death of Nazario, should have been Peña Nieto’s great success. Instead, the escape became his great failure.
Vigilantism is likely to be a significant feature of Latin American crime wars in the coming years. Unless governments can drastically reduce crime, some will take justice into their own hands. In Honduras in 2015, the journalist Orlin interviewed members of a vigilante death squad killing Maras. Vigilante militias are also expanding across the favelas of Rio.
In some situations, I can sympathize with victims turning to the gun. The indigenous community police can certainly be worked with, especially as traditional village councils keep a leash on them. But I don’t see how vigilantes can provide a long-term solution to organized crime. There is always the danger they will carry out atrocities or themselves become a mafia.
Nazario’s form of gangster capitalism is also likely to be a recurring theme. In northeast Mexico, the Zetas got involved in coal mining. In Colombia, I reported on illegal gold mining, in which drug traffickers took over wildcat pits, often getting children to crawl down the perilous holes. The gold ended up in exchanges from Amsterdam to New York at insanely high prices. It is almost as profitable as cocaine.
And we will likely see the Maddest One’s use of narco religion again. In São Paulo, Brazil, I find an academic studying how evangelical churches and the First Commando of the Capital mix together. They use the same rhetoric, calling affiliates “brothers,” talking of “baptism” (whether into the Commando or the church) and of an “enemy” (the devil or the system). Back in Mexico, some of the followers of Zeta boss Heriberto Lazcano, “The Executioner,” also venerate him like a saint.
Perhaps this battle for souls takes place as we are at a historic cross-roads of both political and spiritual beliefs.
After Nazario’s death, I go back to El Alcalde, close to the ranch where he was born. At the entrance to the village is a shrine to Saint Nazario, with a figurine of the holy narco. The vigilantes half smashed it up, leaving it cracked and torn. But they didn’t bother taking a bulldozer to it and its ruins survive covered in dust and weeds. More recently, someone sprayed graffiti on it.
“Chayo Loco. Chinga tu madre,” the paint says. “Chayo, you madman. Fuck your mother.”
Even after death, the hate goes on.
PART VI
Peace?
CHAPTER 48
The American area code flashes up on my cell phone as I ride on a bus back through Michoacán to Mexico City. It’s a desperate call for help from a mother in pain.
Ann Devert of Westchester County, New York, can hardly sleep or eat because her son Harry has disappeared crossing from Michoacán to Guerrero. A free-spirited thirty-two-year-old, Harry was fulfilling a dream, riding a motorcycle across the Americas to reach Brazil for the World Cup. It was the latest leg on Harry’s journeys far and wide that he wrote about on his blog, A New Yorker Travels.
I’m the owner of a big smile and a broad taste for adventure. I haven’t always (or barely ever) walked the beaten path, and I try and live by my ever-evolving set of rules and values as well as I know how. I try to be a good human being. I am a life observer, a world traveler and a resident, light and dark, good and bad, a thinker, an admirer and a critic, a lover and a fighter. I’m passionate about life and I LOVE living. I’m not sure what the purpose of this life is, but I love to talk and debate about it endlessly.1
Crossing Mexico on a green Kawasaki, Harry cruised into Michoacán and toward the Pacific Ocean. He was last seen at a gas station in a town called Huetamo. He sent a message that soldiers had just escorted him along a stretch of road. Then … nothing.
The pain in Ann’s voice cuts through me. She is sure Harry is alive. Could he have hit his head and lost his memory? Is he being held somewhere, even though nobody has called to ask for a ransom? “Somebody is feeding my son and knows where he is,” she says with force.
She is reaching out for information and asks what I think as a journalist.
I pause and swallow. I have to tell her that Huetamo is on a frontline between gangsters in Michoacán and rivals in Guerrero, and both sides eye the highways. I have to say that what you think are soldiers can be cartel gunmen in disguise. I have to say the gangsters in the area are brutal murderers, and there is a real chance that her son is dead.
Ann is perseverant. She is sure Harry is alive. She wants to come down to Mexico to search for him.
When the call finishes, I stare out the bus window at the beautiful lakes of Michoacán. Covering such slaughter, it is easy to become jaded. The piles of corpses, the murder statistics, the confessions of killers, lose their human meaning. As journalists on this beat, we try to keep our cool covering a story of global importance, even while politicians try their best to ignore it. Sometimes, we’re too cut off.
But Ann’s pain reaches me. And tears well up in my eyes and pour down my cheeks.
I guess it’s because I hear the voice of my own mother in hers. Her love and determination shine through; as does the way she is entering a world so alien to her, one that scars her as it has scarred so many.
Ann does come down to Mexico, braving dangerous areas and even reaching out to those inside cartels who may have information. I talk to her several more times, hearing how the search develops, trying to give any advice I can. Other journalists who cover Mexico’s violence try their sources for information. A private detective comes on board.
Ann has moments of hope, finding clues that appear to show her son is alive. “Major help to find Harry is right here, right now. Que Viva Mexico! Que Viva Harry!” she writes in an e-mail.
But the road turns dark. A group of vigilantes put out banners saying a regional cartel boss has murdered Harry. A message stuck next to a corpse also blames a gangster for Harry’s death.
Ann returns home without finding him. From New York, she continues to pursue all avenues.
Four and a half months after his disappearance, police and soldiers find Harry. He is in a field just over the state border into Guerrero. His body is cut into pieces, decomposing and stuffed inside a garbage bag. His motorcycle is next to him, battered and covered in earth.
The motive for the murder is still unclear. Did gunmen mistake Harry for a rival trafficker? Or an American drug agent? Or was it a robbery? Or was he just too slow to stop at a cartel “checkpoint”?
DNA samples confirm his identity. Ann writes a message on a Facebook page on which friends have supported her struggle.
There is no doubt this is Harry, my beloved son … Harry carried each of us in his vast heart. And because there is a place for Harry in each of our own hearts … Harry is alive because YOU are alive.
“ALIVE!, Ma!!!” he would say to me. “How great is that?!!”
I ache from missing my son who was Life’s great gift to me.
Three months later, the police and cartel hit men abduct the forty-three students, also in Guerrero. Ann writes to me again.
“The fact of the students’ murders does make me feel as if Harry’s murder were not merely something he brought on himself,” Ann says. “No one is safe in Guerrero. The authorities who are supposed to protect citizens are not the bedrock of society, they are quicksand. Perhaps this event will be the tipping point that initiates the total overhaul of the corruption and violence that have a stranglehold not just on development but on normal people’s lives.”
Like other grieving parents of the thousands
of innocent victims of Latin America’s crime wars, Ann searches for some meaning to her son’s death. When soldiers die in battle, families have the satisfaction that their loved one perished for a cause. But when gunmen kill someone for just being in the wrong place, it is hard to make sense of it.
Ann rightly points out the bloodshed should make us “overhaul” the system. A million murders over a decade is unacceptable. If there is a meaning to these murders, it is perhaps that they should force us to search for peace.
When thousands took to the streets to protest the disappearances in Guerrero, they called for the students to be returned alive.
“Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos,” became the slogan—“Alive, they took them. Alive, we want them.”
They were likely asking for a miracle. If gangsters or police had not burned the students on the garbage dump, as Mexico’s attorney general said, they had probably killed them somewhere else. There was no ransom demand or any other sign they had kept them alive. The government faced a demand that was likely impossible to fulfill.
Handling the crime wars across Latin America and the Caribbean can often seem an impossible task. Brazilians fear that favelas will always be on the edge of society. Jamaicans moan that politicians will always turn back to gangsters to secure their ballots. Hondurans say resignedly their society is doomed to be violent.
But history shows that human beings are capable of changing societies. Failed policies can be corrected. Corruption is not genetic. If one nation can make an effective justice system, another can too.
The Mexican government cannot bring back the forty-three students alive to their grieving families. But it can stop others from suffering the same fate.
